Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [182]
Lymond smiled. He said, ‘I have something for you to take home. You are going back now, I suppose?’
Richard’s sense of complacency increased. He had already told himself that, with Francis back, and obviously better, his tour of duty could be concluded. The Queen Dowager, he knew, needed his steadying presence in Scotland. And he wanted to go back.
Thinking therefore of ships and packhorses, he took the box Lymond held out. On the lid was written Kevin. Margaret Erskine, he remembered, had chaffed him about that. ‘An Irish name for a Crawford! What says Sybilla to that?’
What Sybilla had said, in fact, was a flat negative to his first choice: No to Francis and No to Gavin. ‘He’s black amber, child. Name him after Mariotta’s people,’ she had said. And Kevin Crawford his heir had become. Richard, his head bent, opened the box.
Inside was a silver rosebush, just six inches high; and on its stark, leafy stem bloomed a single, night-black rose, carved half-open in jet. Their crest, in blue and silver, was set in the base. Lymond spoke, as he sat staring at it. ‘I hope you like it. Send him to me when he is eighteen and needs the money; and I shall direct him to a man called Gaultier who will give him a good price for it.’
They took leave of each other that evening—a definitive parting, because Richard suddenly decided that he could not leave France too soon. Lymond was to join the Court Richard himself had just left, on its way to Châteaubriant for the visit of the English Embassy. Lord Culter himself would ride on north.
In the hour or two they had left together they avoided matters of moment, and Lymond applied himself otherwise to marking the day. The Little God of Love, which had never before witnessed a dice game conducted on a forfeit system connected with clothing, nearly had to call in the watch. There was a good deal of verse making and some singing in the public rooms. And then Lymond, perfectly sober and dangerously playful, collected his grinning train and set off, declaiming.
His brother’s voice, mournfully receding, rang in Richard Crawford’s ears long after the irrepressible party had gone. Turning from the vanished shadows and the misty river, he walked indoors quietly and sat down, the silver rose tree in his palm.
II
Angers: Boarshead and Apple
There are three periods at which the world dies: the period of a plague, of a general war, of the dissolution of verbal contracts. In like manner is fixed the contract by word of mouth, as Adam was condemned for his red fraud: all the world died for one apple.
“ANOTHER Scot! Tête Dieu, they’re spreading like mildew,’ Louis de Bourbon, first Prince of Condé was remarking; and baring his white teeth he enunciated grotesquely. ‘A haile Karolus, man—what’s it worth? It’s worth five pennies, nae mair, in Scotland this day; and a hauf Karolus tuppence ha’penny. Corruption and thievery, man! Sinful corruption and illegal thievery off the Queen’s puir hapless childer the Scots!’
He and his decorative brother, passing the time with backgammon in the Gran’ Salle at Chinon, both laughed excessively, and a large, healthy man with black hair, hanging restlessly behind d’Enghien’s gilt stool, exclaimed, ‘Ah, wait you until we beat at the gates of England, you and I, with thirty thousand Irish at our backs, and the True Church rises and kicks her tormentors in the face. Then the snivelling Scots in their backyards nursing their bent swords can look at heroes and chew on their shame.… Is he the old Queen’s man? I thought the woman was due long since back home.’
Disposing swiftly of an excellent move, d’Enghien reached up absently and patted the big Irishman’s hand. ‘How improvident you are! Do you need money? Don’t malign the Dowager, mon cher. She is a staunch supporter of your designs. She will stay merely to see the assassin Stewart